We have a website where we sell a single product. It was ranked first for years. Because we did everything naturally. We entered original content, used the power of social media, and occasionally bought sponsored posts. However, a few months ago, a competitor site somehow surpassed us and is still in the first place. When looking at the work the competitor has done, there is no decent work other than adding to toplists and getting comment backlinks (even with keywords). When looking at SimilarWeb data, an interesting situation emerges.
As you can see, while most of my site’s traffic is organic search results, 72% of the competitor’s is direct traffic. This result did not seem natural to me at all. We have been in this sector for 5 years and are better known. Our domain is a generic .com. While our Facebook page has 600 likes, the competitor’s has 150. So, it is impossible for the competitor to get this much direct traffic naturally. I reported it to Google because I thought they were spamming, but I got no result. What path do you think I should follow in this situation? I await everyone’s opinions. Especially the experts’ @cryptosam
If you can send your site and the competitor’s site via PM, I would like to review them.
As you mentioned, it seems likely they are spamming, considering the sudden increase in Direct visitors. However, they have done this very successfully and achieved a successful result.
If it were a new site, the likelihood of getting a penalty would be high. The person doing this has followed a successful path and achieved a result.
Sometimes you cannot get a quick response from Google notifications. I think this is why they haven’t seen anything negative.
I suggest you increase engagement with the visitors coming to the site. It is also observed that if they managed to keep the Direct visitor on the site, this increases success as well.
In other words, if visitors came to your site from search engines but stayed for 2 minutes, and visitors came directly to the competitor’s site but stayed for 5 minutes, it is highly likely they will outrank you.
Please do not fall into a pessimistic and sad state, and please do not take a wrong step.
I’ve been following the subject closely, but I have no information on how it concluded. Actually, I have a similar problem myself. I would appreciate it if anyone could help. My 6-year-old site, which ranked first for its keyword for 5 years, has been in second place for about 6 months. The interesting part is that the site in question is a blogspot site. Its backlink profile appears worse than ours. It seems they did intense work initially. I don’t understand how they have been ranking first for 6 months, despite having very low daily visitor numbers and pages that, in my opinion, look like spam. If there are friends who can analyze this, I can provide the keyword and links. I am very curious about what technique they are using.
Unfortunately, no one helped. The situation is still the same. I have sent feedback to Google a few times. I think the site has been taken under review. I am waiting.
Even though the topic is a bit dated, I wanted to write this since it is related to the subject. Here, we are all curious about how direct entry is achieved. I had the opportunity to observe this in a study I recently conducted. I noticed this situation while tracking my daily visits via Analytics. I recommend that you examine it as well. When I share the articles and tags I added on social media, Analytics shows me that the traffic comes from social media. However, when I added the new page and tags via the Web Archive, it detected this as a direct entry, and I observed that the time spent on the page also increased as long as the page remained open. I hope you can see this by applying it to your own sites and checking via Analytics.
Apart from this, links coming from YouTube are another factor that extends the time spent on the site. You can test this by trying to see how many seconds the entry from YouTube lasts. Just for your information, when you enter from the sites where you have provided your links, it appears on your screen as a direct entry..
